


interregnum

by simplyprologue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Monarchy Angst, Nuclear Winter, Past Clexa - Freeform, Political Expediency, Season/Series 04, Slow Romance, background Kabby - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-29 21:09:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10144217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: They're willing to do what they must, to save their people. It's a marriage of political convenience that will leave them highly inconvenienced, but at least they all have a chance at surviving. (Or, how Clarke Griffin becomes Queen of the Ice Nation. Goes AU at the end of 4.05, before the destruction of Arkadia.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I really, really blame [Lelanie](http://fandammit.tumblr.com/) and [Emily](http://shefollowedfires.tumblr.com/) for this. And by "blame" I mean "thank them profusely for encouraging me to do it." This goes AU before Ilian has the chance to send Arkadia up in a ball of flames, but assume everything that happened before that is fair game. There's a Game of Thrones reference in this chapter, and an obligatory Shakespeare shout out. Character and ship tags will be added as more people come into play, rating will likely become M later on.
> 
> Thanks to [Dee](http://druidkeyleth.tumblr.com/) for her translation help!

“What is the holiness of empire?  
It is to know collapse.  
Everything can collapse.  
Houses, bodies  
and enemies  
collapse  
when their rhythm becomes  
deranged.”

— Anne Carson, _The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide_

 

* * *

 

  
“Is this a good idea?” Bellamy asks, hands on his hips and poised with discontent.

Good and right and smart barely ever coincide, not these past months and definitely at no significant point this past century. Clarke, rubbing her thumb over the deepening lines on her forehead, sits wearily at the table.

“It makes perfect sense,” she says, voice deceptively placid.

Which is, perhaps, the most worrisome part. Or perhaps the fact that she is completely okay with this, which is the most worrisome part. She can’t tell, and can’t rouse herself to care. It’s a plan that is concise in its execution, and they need _time_ and so that is all she can bring herself to care about.

“Clarke!” he protests again.

Taking a deep breath, she looks at her mother, whose face is smoothed into a mask of gleaming calm. She knows if she pushes, she would see the doubt, the guilt, the woman who cannot fathom that she is asking this of her daughter. Clarke doesn’t push. Instead she looks to Kane, his mouth set in an austere line. He would ask this of her, and does. Kane has never balked at asking them to sacrifice.

Clarke nods to him.

“Trikru will stay with Skaikru,” she says slowly, imagining the whole of the map before her, the dots marking the located bunkers and weighing them against the doses of nightblood serum, the dozen or so hazmat suits in Arkadia’s store. Closing her eyes, she tastes her arguments, pushes them behind her teeth, swallows them down. “Azgeda will have to, at the least, not march against Skaikru, and won’t march against Trikru. As Azgeda goes, so will Delfikru and Podakru. If Trikru goes along with it, so will Boudalankru. And everyone else… will stop ducking for cover. And then we can save as many people as we can.”

Five hundred is the bare minimum viable population for the continuation of humanity as a species, but closer to four thousand is needed for sustainable biodiversity. They cannot all just _kill each other_ while jockeying for survival.

Four more weeks. Five, if they’re lucky. There is no more time for battles in the streets of Polis, or armies marching through to take settlements.

Millions will still die.

“But marrying you to — to him?” Bellamy asks, gesturing to Roan, who looks bored by the proceedings.

Clarke is certain that Roan isn’t bored, that if there were fewer people in the room he might respond with an expression of disgust, but he usually saves all of his distaste for her and her alone. _Bellamy_ almost certainly means no offense to Roan’s person but for the Ice Nation and Kane and her mother’s proposed solution to the rising tensions, that perhaps playing by Grounder rules might beget a more peaceful outcome.

Or, at least, a detente for just long enough. No one would attack Skaikru if one of Skaikru’s last serving daughters was also the Queen of Azgeda, with it’s thousands upon thousands of soldiers. It would give them free passage into other clan’s lands who might not be so otherwise lenient, provide them access to more resources from before the fall.

And it requires nothing of her, but marriage. A much lower cost than she’s used to.

Laughing in a way that is completely humorless, Clarke looks at Bellamy. “What do you think we should do, then?”

He’s silent, for a moment.

“And where will you — when the doors close, will you be in Arkadia or with Azgeda?”

“Azgeda, of course,” she answers blithely, as though the prospect does not terrify her, but she has become accustomed to living in terror. “The doors will open in five years, Bellamy. I need to stay with Azgeda to make sure the peace lasts. Foster… goodwill.” The other implication, to remain to ensure that Roan or god forbid, his successor, plans on marching on Arkadia or Polis or whatever ruins remain to be ruled over before the rest of them can crawl out from their bunkers.

“And what if it’s a trap?” Bellamy asks forcefully.

This, finally, rouses Roan to speak and he stands, hand gripping the pommel of his sword. “Do you think I would allow my own people to kill my wife?”

There’s a short, gruff noise that escapes Bellamy’s throat that might, just might, be a laugh. The two men circle each other in the center of the room, Roan’s fingers still seeking his sword and Bellamy’s beginning to scant against his gun. Kane, in the corner, eyes them warily — but this was his idea, first, and so cannot voice an objection without possibly ruining the entire deal. Honestly, Clarke thinks as her eyes trace the dark corners of metal plating and the thin apertures of light through the viewports, she might not miss Arkadia. She grew up in Alpha station, but on Earth it has never been her home.

Everything changed when they fell from space.

“I don’t know, I’ve seen Ice Nation do some pretty screwed up things. To _our_ own people — think of Farm Station!” Bellamy looks at her, his eyes asking her to reconsider. She does not give him what he’s hoping for, so he turns to Kane and Abby. “How do we know Clarke will be safe?”

“It’s a fair question, Roan,” Kane concedes.

“Because when I make a promise to protect and defend someone, I mean it.”

Because Roan kom Azgeda may be accused of being many things, and although he is grim, he is honorable. The lacerations on their palms are healing into lines of pearlescent scar tissue, and Clarke doubts she will ever look into her right hand without remembering that she, at one time, pledged her survival with his.

“He means it,” she answers, fingers curling into a fist. “He took a bullet for me. A bullet, I may remind you, came from your gun.”

Her expression does not turn accusatory, but she does look at Kane with an eyebrow cocked.

“Marcus didn’t—”

Her mother, pushing herself out of her seat, quite literally leaps to defend him. But no one standing in the Chancellor’s office needs a reminder, or a list, of all the atrocities committed while people were under the control of ALIE.

“And everyone in this room knows that,” she continues. “We do what we must, to save our people.”

“And if we can’t save our people?” Bellamy asks “What if Raven and Jackson can’t make enough nightblood? We have the ship, and the bunkers Jaha scouted, but what if—”

“Then we will save who we can, same as it’s ever been,” Roan answers, eyes narrowing, perhaps daring Bellamy to suggest otherwise, put forth a plan to save everyone that would compromise them all, or renege on her first deal with Roan.

He cared little at the time, when they saved the slaves on Farm Station in Ice Nation territory. He could care _now_ , even though Clarke doubts he would. At heart, Roan is a ruthless pragmatist. He knows, too, that they have no time left to waste fighting. They have no time left for mistakes. And if the people of his nation who were to not survive Praimfiya were the slavers, she doubted he would mourn them.

“Will that be Clarke?”

“Bellamy!” Kane, this time, seems weary.

There will be deaths, she thinks. “It doesn’t—”

“If the great Wanheda became Queen of the Ice Nation,” Roan interrupts her, but does not look at her, and for once, when he calls her the Commander of Death his voice does not imply any mocking by invoking her ill-gotten honorific, “my people would not touch her.”

“Even Echo? What will she have to say?”

“It doesn’t matter what she has to say.” The hint of a wry smile pulls at one corner of his mouth; the small squabbles in Arkadia are beneath him, in his nation that he rules by fiat. “I am her king. She doesn’t have to like it.”

“But if she—”

“She would find her head separated from her neck, for daring even to dream about harming the Azplana. And she knows that.”

“If any harms comes to Clarke—”

The half-grin dissipates into a look that might be a snarl, or would be on the face of a man with less restraint.

“I will offer you my life, willingly.”

Clarke, who was satisfied the moment she evaluated the proposed deal, sees something like acceptance finally appear on Bellamy’s face. And her mother, who was at least quiet in her reticence, is somewhat calmed by Roan’s promise. No mother wishes to think of her daughter marrying to stave off political bloodsport, but with Lexa dead, Clarke wonders what her mother could possibly hope for her. And Kane, for his due, just seems relieved that something today has gone _well._

“So,” she says, looking at her to-be husband. “How are we doing this?”

 

* * *

 

On the Ark, a wedding was a trip to the Station’s record office, and declaring the intent to wed. A blood test would be conducted to ensure the applicants were not within the dangerous range of consanguinity. Then paperwork would be signed, and new quarters, if available, requisitioned. Names could be changed, within the crumbling database, and new ration cards issued. Perhaps the new room would be toasted with a tin cup of moonshine, and if you were from a family of some standing, you might inherit a set of rings.

All in all, the revelry if there was any, was conducted swiftly over the course of an hour or two.

A Grounder wedding takes roughly thirty-six hours, from start to finish. The clock begins when Clarke walks into Polis a week after she and Roan agree to the terms of marriage, escorted by a garrison of Azgeda soldiers and members of their own guard, alongside a unit of Indra’s warriors who appear to be taking orders from Octavia.

“Why am I being so heavily guarded? I’m not going to run away,” she asks Indra herself.

She marches warily, meeting Clarke’s light walk with a more determined pace. “The Ice Nation has not had a consort in over seventy years.”

“What?”

Indra’s lips twist into a displeased grimace, her eyes looking everywhere but Clarke’s face as she searches windows for archers, alleys for an ambush. Kane and her mother have gone ahead to the Citadel at the front of the procession to meet with the Azgeda delegation, and Clarke walks near the back, growing more and more uncomfortable with the attention of the thousands of Grounders who have come to Polis to either celebrate the wedding or deride the spectacle of it or, at the least, partake in the food and drink.

“Queen Nia never married any of her lovers. Her father, King Theo, was the same. The last Ice Nation king who took a wife was — well, she was used against him, and the Ice Nation almost fell,” Indra explains flatly. “They say the _jus drein, jus daun_ became our way when the first Ice Queen was taken by the Mountain Men. The Ice King would have sacrificed not only his clan, but every clan, to get her back.”

“What happened?” Clarke asks, her gaze following Indra’s through the crowds.

“A terrible war. Ended by the Commander, who created the first coalition.”

Her brow furrows. “Then why is King Roan—”

“Because Azgeda’s hold over the coalition is weak, and will be ever weaker once there are nightblood children old enough to fight him for the flame.”

“But the flame was destroyed,” Clarke says. Her words are met with a stony silence, not agreement. “Indra?”

“Killing and politics are not always the same thing.”

A wry smile quirks Clarke’s lips, and she shutters the memories of the abortive conclave, of Ontari raising Aden’s head by his golden curls, tossing it onto the floor in front of her enemies. She does not think of Lexa and Roan’s trial by combat, or the quiver of Lexa’s spear in Queen Nia’s chest. She does not think of herself and Roan, heads bowed together, plotting regicide. Or the pull of the trigger of her gun, the look on Wallace’s face when Dante forsake him. The look on her own father’s face when the airlock engaged.

“Not from what I’ve seen,” she mutters.

“Trikru, Azegedakru, Delfikru, Trishanakru, Podakru, Skaikru, each of the thirteen clans — they’re all just spokes on a wheel. That one’s on top, then that one’s on top, an ever-spinning wheel of betrayal, killing thousands. King Roan wants to stop the wheel,” Indra says, voice as cold as ever. But her eyes hide a warning, and perhaps, a flicker of affection. “He will use you, Wanheda. Many fear your power. He does not dare to kill you yet, and maybe he does not want to kill you at all, so he will take you this way.”

“Lexa could not stop the wheel, how could Roan?” she asks.

“Lexa wanted to _break_ the wheel,” Indra seethes.

“And Lexa was above clan,” Clarke murmurs. “I must be. Roan knows that. He wouldn’t hurt me, not unless he has to. He knows he can _use me_ , like you said, but only if he keeps me alive,” she counters, sounding braver than she feels. “He promised me, if I was his wife—”

“One day, ask your new husband about what his mother did to her brothers and sisters,” Indra answers flatly. “It is why we protect you. It is why your mother worries.”

If Clarke has one regret, it is being separated from her mother again.

“And if I was your child?” she asks, honestly wondering what Indra’s advice would be to her own daughter.

“You are not. I think what you are doing is stupid, and will get you killed,” is her reply. “It will keep Azgeda in control of the clans, and prevent a rightful Commander from taking the throne. But it will keep enough of us alive. And when they kill you, it will anger enough people to see Ice Nation destroyed once and for all.”

“You really think they’ll kill me?”

Roan would have killed her, had he needed to secure his throne. He would have killed her, to take Arkadia. But he’s just as soon to let her live, if it’s possible. He has saved her life more than once, and without gain. Maybe Roan feels nothing for her, but he holds her in high enough esteem to think of her more useful alive.

“Look around, Wanheda. You are the lamb being brought to the slaughter.” Indra nods to the wall of Azgeda soldiers lining the main thoroughfare, at the shadow of the tower stretching out to welcome them. “We all know what your sacrifice is, and we will not allow you to go to the altar alone.”

 

* * *

 

 They are welcomed with the first of many feasts. It feels wasteful, but Clarke looks out over the faces at the long tables, and realizes that in less than a month, and despite their best efforts, many of these faces will be dead. If this is the price for their souls as well as their survival, she’ll pay it.

Across the room, Roan sits on his throne, crown on his head.

Echo, sitting at his side, wears a perpetual scowl. Is she worried that Roan is lowering himself to marry her, or is she rankled at the prospect of being replaced — nominally, at the most — as Roan’s right hand?

Woods Clan and Sky People drink together, laughing raucously in the dim gold of the firelight. _Now what?_ the rest seem to think, waiting on the ringing of steel, for swords to be drawn. In their places of honor, the Ambassadors seem just as uncertain. Is this a farce? Clarke folds her hand around a cup of clear liquor, bringing it to her lips. Is it? When she was little, and she would imagine her wedding, she thought of Wells. Even if she did not love him like her mother loved her father, Wells was safety.

By the time she was sent to the ground, she didn’t imagine marrying anyone. Not Finn, not Niylah, not even Lexa.

Roan has promised to keep her safe, despite what Indra thinks.

It’s all she’s ever hoped for.

Both of her parents’ rings hang on a chain; she twists the metal around her fingers, tightening it to the point of pain. It is a marriage between members of two different clans, and so they must bring something from each of their clans. She knows Roan is giving her a crown — it was fitted to her head, a coronet of bone and iron. In return, she will give him her father’s ring. It will not mark him regnal of anything, not like he plans to mark her.

But it’s her father’s wedding ring.

“Are you sure, sweetheart?” her mother asks for not the first time. “What about Lexa?”

Clarke lets herself be gathered in Abby’s arms.

“I don’t think I’m in danger of falling in love with Roan,” she says, muffling her reply against Abby’s shoulder.

Humming, she presses a kiss of Clarke’s temple.

“Let me take care of you tonight, please?” she asks, stroking the hair off her forehead, and each deigns to ignore the other’s tears. “Even if it’s not for love, I’d always imagined taking care of you the night before your wedding. Your last night as my little girl.”

Looping her arms around her mother’s waist, Clarke closes her against a rising wave of emotion. She bites her lip, stemming the words she might say. The regrets she might have, any residual bitterness she holds for their partings. This is not how she wishes to remember her last weeks with her mother, if that is what they are.

“Please,” she whispers.

Abby leads Clarke from the feast, and to her rooms. If anyone notices them leaving, they allow them to do it quietly.

They have five years of memories to make, and one night to make them in.

 

* * *

 

The next day holds more than the exchanging of vows. Privately, Clarke is anointed by the High Priest of Azgeda, then introduced to the Wormanahou, the dread-faced war chiefs of the Ice Nation who must each in turn swear fealty to her. Bellamy, his gun loaded at his hip, trails a foot or so behind her — the rest of the Skaikru delegation is at a special meeting of the Ambassadors in the throne room before political business is closed for the day.

“Is this normal?” he asks, once each of the twelve have kneeled and presented their swords to her.

“This isn’t… normal,” Clarke answers, clenching her hands into the fur of the leather cloak an Azgeda hangada dressed her in this morning. “From what I can tell, the kings and queens of the Ice Nation don’t usually marry. I think this is Roan trying to… protect me from any dissidents.”

Indra’s warning echoes in her mind.  

“It’s not too late, you know. I know where the rover’s parked, where Kane is keeping the keys,” Bellamy says, joking but also… clearly not. She knows she need only say the word, and he would help her take the nuclear option. “We can be in whatever’s left of Mexico—” Not much, according to the drone pictures, “by tomorrow’s breakfast.”

“Bellamy,” she chides him.

She knows none of the Wormana have heard him, but still she examines their faces for any sign of acknowledged disrespect. Thankfully, she finds none.

“Maybe not breakfast. Lunch.”

An exasperated sigh rolls through her. “Bellamy.”

“I know. I know you feel like you have to do this,” he says, sidling close to her.

Closer, anyway. They all must have one drink — Clarke thinks this might be rye, or whisky, and wonders how Azgeda makes their alcohol. They’ve definitely provided enough of it. She contemplates the bottom of her cup, thinking of all the reasons she _has to do this_ , and how many of them have to do with Bellamy’s decisions. But still, she swallows down her bitterness.

“I’ll miss you,” he says softly, and she knows he must live with his own decisions as well.

“I’ll miss you too,” she answers, just as soft. “Thanks for keeping me alive. But I have to do this alone.”

Their hands hang an inch apart. Looking at the Wormana, she reaches out with her pinky, curling it around his. A smile, a small vulnerable thing, passes over Bellamy’s face.

“So what do you plan on doing, once you’re a queen?”

They both smile, but then something harder settles over both of their features. They know the histories of queens, and kings, some killed in battle and some slain by their own subjects, some poisoned, some killed sleeping. Some deposed, all murdered. _For within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king…_

“I won’t be a queen,” she corrects him. “I’ll be an Azplana.”

She walks to the altar dressed as one.   

She is helped into yards of grey velvet held in place by a black corset and steel clasps. Her hair braided back simply and bound in black cotton — there is no use in pretending the Sky People have any attachment to the ceremony of braids, but her hair should be pulled back from her face, at the least. Her eyes are ringed with kohl, and Octavia, with careful fingers, applies a thin layer of silvery white warpaint in a slash down her face.

When she looks at herself in the mirror, she thinks of Lexa.

Clarke Griffin will never kneel before anyone ever again.

“Nothing to say?” she asks Octavia, as they walk through the hushed crowds.

Night has fallen, the street lined with torches. The spectacle of it has begun, as she is escorted through Polis by her attendants, some chosen for their skill with a gun or a sword, and some — her mother, to give her away. And Kane, as the Chancellor, to solemnize the wedding as a political event. Both, to deliver her from the tenuous safety of her own people to the Ice Nation.

If anyone was going to kill her, it would be now.

“I hope you’re not expecting me to call you _your grace_ or any of that bullshit,” Octavia answers, which is possibly better than anything else Clarke hoped she might say.

“Honestly, I think you’d be better suited for this than I am.”

She scoffs. “You really don’t see it, do you?”

Clarke furrows her brow in confusion. “See what?”

As Octavia is wont to do, she denies her an answer. Ahead, she hears the cheers of Azgedakru as their party processes towards them, Roan at the head of it with Echo, the High Priest, the Wormana. Except for a brief moment at the feast the night before, she has not had the chance to speak to him. By design — this wedding is a political event, and neither has given the other reason to doubt their resolve.

Roan has never betrayed her.

He has been painfully blunt, and callous, but always honest.

They enter the arena, and she sees him, every inch a king. Time slows, moments stretching out before her. Heart thundering in her chest, she lifts her chin, eyes locking on Roan’s. _It’s just marriage_ , she remembers herself thinking. _Just marriage._ It’s just marriage that has her shaking, knees turning to water as she walks on Abby and Kane’s arms. Unblinking, she locks her limbs when they meet in the center.

A thrill of terror shoots through her.

She cannot look at Bellamy, who would without a doubt indulge her tardy instinct to _run._

Instead she allows her mother to kiss her cheek, and for Kane to put her hand on Roan’s arm. And then she feels nothing, walking to the altar on the stage as if she was merely an observer to these events.

She does not love him. She never will. She does not know if they will ever even be friends.

She is eighteen years old.

Together, she and Roan take one step, then two, and then twenty. The sound of war drums compete with the blood rushing her in ears, a heavy feeling of dread plunking into her stomach. And for as leaden has her belly feels, her fingers and toes are starbursting from nerves, so she clenches down on Roan’s arm. If he notices, he says nothing — he too, is staring straight ahead, although his face is much more impassive than hers.

Swallowing hard, she schools her face into a steadier expression.

In matching time, they take the few steps from the ground to the dias, footsteps heavy on the dilapidated wood. Then the procession stops, the Azgeda priest taking his place in front of the altar laden with a bowl of sacred fire burning from black powder — the smell is cloying, and almost acrid, but she is used to it from her time in Lexa’s court. Clarke feels someone straightening her skirts and is startled to see Octavia caring for the length of tattered velvet trailing behind her. For one half of a heartbeat, their eyes meet.

“Who gives this woman from her clan, to enter into marriage?” the priest asks, and Clarke snaps her head forward.

“We do,” she hears her mother and Kane answer in unison.

And then, just Kane, voice set and determined, “Her mother and her Chancellor.”

“Who gives this man from his clan, to enter into marriage?”

Echo steps forward, her face painted in the stark black and white paint of Azgeda. Her face is bathed in shadows, and Clarke realizes that she’s seeing her for the first time without her layers of armor and fur. She seems so much smaller, like this, but no less deadly. “I do, his Hand.”

“Do you, King Roan of the Ice Nation, take this woman willingly as your wife?”

Straightening his back, he chances a look at her out of the corner of his eye. “I do.”

“Do you, Clarke Griffin of the Sky People, Mountain Slayer and Commander of Death, take this man willingly as your husband?”

A month ago, Bellamy asked her if she trusted Roan with her life, and she had said no. And she still doesn’t. But she trusts that he will keep his word, so long as she keeps hers. And so long as they are on that keel, she can trust him to save her life, just as she’ll save his. Nodding, she looks at Roan, and then the priest.

“I do.”

The priest lifts his hands out, palms up.

“Then draw your swords, and consecrate your vows.”

Clarke reaches for the small blade strapped to her waist, a sword that would never hold up in any battle that was pressed into her hands as she rehearsed her vows earlier. Indra and Octavia had berated her on pronunciation, and Clarke knew better than to ask why every part of the ceremony could be in Gonasleng except this one.

This is the part that the common folk, and not just the soldiers, need to hear.

On a shaky exhale, she turns to face Roan. The blades of their swords cross, Clarke’s knuckles turning white on the hilt of hers. She forces herself to look up from her ragged cuticles and up to him, finding herself surprised by the intensity of the look on his face. A tremor races through her, and she shivers visibly.

His expression does not change, but he removes one hand from his sword to cup hers. the calloused pads of his fingers glancing over her palm. _Are you ready, Wanheda?_ he seems to ask, and she nods. They speak in unison, neither projecting — this might be a show, a _spectacle,_ but in the moment neither can bring themselves to perform. Out of the thousand or so in Polis, the hundreds crowded around the dias, maybe fifty can hear them.

“Yu jus ste ai jus.”

 _Your blood is my blood._ They reach up, opening the wounds on their palms again.

“Yu klaka ste ai klaka.”

 _Your bone is my bone._ They exchange the swords, gleaming in red as blood drips down in rivulets. The priest, holding the rings that once belonged to Jacob and Abigail Griffin aloft, places them on the tips of the blades.

“Ai fou daun ai swison sad gon sad kom yun.”

 _I lay my blade down side by side with yours._ Retrieving the rings, they fold them into bloodied palms, and then place the swords into the fire.

“Kom disha sintaim, kom taim oso las sintaim, yu gonplei ste ai gonplei.”

 _From this day, until our last day, our fight is one._ They slide the rings onto each others fingers, slippery with blood. Her father’s ring only goes up to Roan’s second knuckle, and her mother’s is too loose on her finger — but they were never intended to be worn.

“Oso kik raun bilaik won.”

_We live as one._

Roan turns back — and into his hands passes a circlet of antlers and deer vertebrae, from what Clarke could tell from her earlier examination. What meaning it holds, if any in comparison to the canine jaws circling his own temples, is lost on her. He looks at her — really looks at her, fingers pressing in at the sharp angles of wired-together bone.

She wonders if he wants her to kneel.

Jutting out her bottom lip, she looks at him with as much defiance as she can muster.

With a low laugh, he raises the crown, and places it gently on her head. Then, pressing his hand on the small of her back, turns her to the crowd. One Ice Nation man drops, and then another, and another — until half of the crowd is bowed before her.

“Ai haiplana!”

_Your queen._

 

* * *

 

Raven and Jackson return from space, landing in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay with some five thousand doses of nightblood serum, sent to Polis, to be distributed — and the distribution to be overseen by a joint-committee of Skaikru, Azgeda, and Trikru. They’re just waiting on the Rovers to arrive from Arkadia, the numbers for each clan to be tabulated.

Trishanakru, for their failed attack on Arkadia, is voted out of the coalition.

With bleak agreement, the King and Queen of the Ice Nation declare that none from the Glowing Forest clan shall survive.  

Roan grants free travel between borders, and Jaha combs the countryside for Bill Cadogan’s abandoned bunkers and ALIE’s earliest attempts at “saving” humanity. A hydrogenerator is found, and then two more — in the desert ruins of Manhattan, a place for a thousand souls is found. Hope, a fragile thing, takes wing. A smile can even be found on Roan’s face, some days.

“We can save more people,” Clarke tells him, the crown slipping down her forehead. “But even with the nightblood serum, people will need food, water. Praimfiya will destroy crops and taint the water, we need to—”

“Do whatever you need to, ai Haiplana,” he says. “You’re a queen now. Find someone, and tell them what to do.”

Refugees flee from the north and the south, telling tales of a wall of yellow destruction.

And one night, while Clarke sleeps in her bed in Polis, Trikru escorts Luna into the city. Two doses of nightblood are taken — one for Octavia, and one for a young apprentice fleimkeepa named Gaia. The alarm is raised, and by the time Clarke pushes into the room Echo is holding the flame aloft, screaming blasphemy and treason.

“Ai haiplana, we must kill them—”

Instead, Clarke lets them run. She is a queen, and she orders the guard to let them go. But Echo holds the flame, and knows that it’s survival spells betrayal.

“Arrest the Queen!”

Azgeda guards leap for her, and she raises her arms to shield her face when she hears a blade being unsheathed, and then the song of steel against steel. She opens her eyes, sees Roan between herself and Echo, locked with a guard who realizes, half a moment too late, that he has crossed swords with his liege lord.

“Stand down,” he growls.

“Skaikru and Trikru have conspired against us, tricked you into matrimony with Wanheda instead of killing her and taking her power as you should have done—”

“I said, stand _down_ —”

“Sire, I told you this would happen if you married her. Trikru and Skaikru would betray us, and use her as a distraction. Now look at what has happened to our people!”

“Stand down,” Roan orders the Guard again.

Half the guards do, and half do not. Clarke remembers Roan’s somber pronouncement in the day following the collapse of the City of Light. Humanity might have six months, but without her or without the flame, he would have six days. Dressed in her nightclothes, she feels bare in comparison to the soldiers.

It would take very little to kill her.

Resentment plain on her face, Echo destroys one of the batches of the nightblood serum, glass shattering against the floor. The tiles stain black. Clarke’s heart skitters and stops, and she sees Lexa’s blood under her hands, Lexa’s eyes emptying out as she tried to save her. “This blasphemy,” Echo shouts, destroying another case.

Clarke reaches for the dagger concealed in her sleeve.

Roan looks back at her, arms beginning to shake. Then, he throws off the guard, spinning to reach her. Hands gripping her biceps, he pushes her into the arms of one of the remaining loyal soldiers, and with his mouth at her ear, whispers, “Run.”

She does not know why he saves her life.

Still, she does as he says, and runs.

 

* * *

 

 She makes it to Arkadia by dawn, and wait for the Ice Nation army to come. They wait one day, and then two, and by the third — they see the dim glow of fire in the distance, rolling closer to them in an ever-consuming wave.

“Four days, depending on the wind,” is Raven’s pronouncement.

Arkadia will save six hundred.

 

* * *

 

In the end, Clarke gives up her place on the list. When she was supposed to stay with Azgeda, she removed herself. Abby and Kane try to write her back on, but she has no interest. Not when there will still be others left outside in other clans, not when she thinks of the thousands of doses of nightblood spilled out on the floor in Polis. She saves Murphy, she thinks, or his girlfriend. Or maybe she’ll be saving Monty, or Harper. She does not care who it is, so long as someone is saved. Her people will survive and she is so very, very tired. She knows there are two vials of nightblood left, and a working hazmat suit.

On the last day, she holds her mother tightly.

Allows her to administer the serum. Promises to return. Kane surprises her with an embrace once she finds the strength to let go over her mother, combs his fingers through her hair like a maybe-father would. "I'll take care of her," he promises, and she does not deny that she's worried. Bellamy puts a book into her hand, leather bound and the pages bleached, and tells her the count the days. _Five years._

“Will you make it, princess?” he asks, smile faltering.

Octavia didn’t come home.

For what might be the last time, she turns her back on Arkadia, hoping to make it to the Dropship before the radiation cloud. The oxygen levels in the air drop first, consumed by the oncoming flames. It’s not a far journey, just two clicks, but she struggles. Overhead, lightning crackles through the sky, and the sun is blackened out. Clarke checks her supplies, not for the first time — she has two weeks of rations, and a few day’s worth of water. The nightblood will not keep her from getting sick, or even dying with enough exposure. But it will save her, if she ventures out for supplies. If she eats something radioactive, her body will process it.

Dehydration will kill her first, most likely.

By the time she makes it to the Dropship, her first home on earth, she can barely see. Still, she manages to clamber inside, shutting the hatch by feel alone. It hisses closed, and she reaches into her pack to shake one of the breaker lights. Careful, she sheds the hazmat suit dropping into its own corner. If she can find water, she’ll decontaminate it the best she can. If not, it will stay there until she absolutely must go out to forage for food.

She lifts the light, wondering if the mattress is still there on the third floor and how much of the radiation shielding survived the hard landing. The Dropship could only hold twenty people for five years. They had never assessed it. But, she figures it only needs to last her a few months at the most.

Thunder rumbles, vibrating the metal plating. Over the din of the oncoming storm, she hears a small noise of pain.

“Is anyone there?” She lifts her light higher. “Hello? Is anyone—”

She gasps.

The Ice Nation army didn’t come, but rather, Roan tried to. Face and neck and hands covered in radiation burns, lungs gasping for clean air, he’s — he’s _dying._ She drops down to her bag, fishing out the metal medical case inside.

“Here, I have—”  

“Don’t even think about — don’t save me, dammit!” he moans, collapsing onto the floor.

Frowning, Clarke assembles the last viable dose of nightblood, twisting the vial into place on the gun. With two fingers she finds the vein in his neck, feels the weak thrum of his pulse. “You have a real gratitude problem, you know?”

Unceremoniously, she flicks the release switch on the needle gun, and saves his life.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are always appreciated, and if you're interested you can hit me up on [tumblr](http://ofhouseadama.tumblr.com/)!


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